Touken Ranbu Kai: Kyoden Moyuru Honnouji

This is one of those shows where it's obviously meant to be targeted towards those familiar with the franchise, so if you don't know much about Touken Ranbu, you might want to either skip this or otherwise try to familiarize yourself with the characters/ setting beforehand.

This show does the absolute bare minimum in introducing/ establishing the setting and characters as it assumes the viewer to already be familiar with them and their general relationships/ dynamic with one another. As such, watchers jumping into this without any prior knowledge of the franchise will most probably be left with either confusion or annoyance/ frustration as they try ... to make sense of who the characters are and why they (the viewer) should care about them/ their struggles, especially moreso when there's such a large cast and new viewers have to figure out who's meant to be a main character and who's meant to be a supporting character.

This anime is meant to be an adaptation of the Touken Ranbu stage play; however, it does not follow the stage play exactly and instead omits certain plot points (Sayo's fixation on revenge) or puts them in the background (Yamanbagiri's self-doubts about being the attendant). It adds a few differences here and there, but the main points of the stage play are still present. If you've watched the stage play before, it's a decent enough adaptation that's worth the watch as it does adapt certain key scenes from the stage play and gives a bit more insight on the focused characters. If you haven't watched the stage play, then it does a decent enough job of getting the story across and can serve well as a general starting point to garner interest towards the actual stage play continuity.

The primary focus of the show are the swords of Oda Nobunaga, primarily Fudou Yukimitsu (the main focus), Souza Samonji, and Heshikiri Hasebe. Of course, they include the other fan favourites such as Mikazuki and the starter swords, but the Nobunaga swords take most of the spotlight.

Despite being a short anime of only 8 episodes, it can get awfully repetitive as the story moves extremely slowly with little to no development of the characters themselves until near/ at the very end, and even then, the development comes across as rather abrupt and maybe even confusing.

The animation and animation quality itself is pretty nice. The fight scenes are animated quite well, using 3DCG for the enemies as well as adopting a few stylistic choices here and there.

Overall, it's a decent to good show to watch if you're an existing fan of the franchise; otherwise, if you're new to the franchise, you might want to reconsider watching this or try watching the other Touken Ranbu anime (ex. Hanamaru and/ or Katsugeki) first.

I really love Touken Ranbu, since its first anime but this season has really been disappointing in terms of quality. I understand that ufotable did not continue with the project for kimetsu no yaiba. But the change of study was terrible. In addition to a story that was left half finished with 8 episodes. I love touken ranbu with all my heart but it deserved a production with more love.

It really has no comparison to its predecessor seasons in terms of quality in animation, be it Hanamaru or Katsugeki, I hope Domerica studio does not continue adapting Touken Ranbu if they give it another season.

This anime is not exactly based on the original game, but based on the live action 2.5D stage play, where real people play the roles of the original 2D characters. It's anime adaptation of the live action adaptation of the original game. I don't know why they decided to go with that concept. Not like most of the other Touken Ranbu adaptations, stage one has its own detailed setting and overarching storyline, and it's pretty divisive too. So I think they should make it clear every time they promote this anime or sell collaboration products that it's based on the 'stage: touken ranbu'. For me, ... finding that out wasn’t exactly pleasant.

Even putting that aside, this anime is disappointing.

The animation is not bad, I guess. But there is no consistency in the character design. They do resemble the official character illustration though. There are scores of different illustrators in Touken Ranbu, and in this show, each character looks like they're from completely different anime. The other Touken Ranbu anime Hanamaru and Katsugeki have their own animation style, i'm not sure this one does. Even the same character looks different in every scene, as if they don’t have a proper design for this series. Really distracting.

The story is nothing special. It's too predictable. They also failed to get people to sympathize with the characters because they didn't explain much while dragging out the story unnecessarily. The way they portray the characters is subpar. Some characters were deliberately made into jerk or stupid for the sake of the plot's convenience. This anime lacks character development and throws in fanon tropes without much thought. It's shocking when Fudou Yukimitsu call Yamanbagiri Kunihiro "manba chan"

Maybe that would have been all okay if this was some fan service anime just introducing characters like Hanamaru. But they tried to create a complete story, and selected the characters for that purpose, deciding who to focus on and who to leave out. If the story had to be reused from the stage, at least it should've been made to stand out as an anime. This anime has no identity.

No offense, but please let this 2.5D playwright just write plays. This is more of an overblown tribute to the stage play and is intended to lower the entry barrier to the live-action stuff. For the most part, they didn’t satisfy both stage fans and original game fans.

I don't really hate the stage play itself, but as a long time fan of the Touken Ranbu, I want Touken Ranbu anime that is based on the original game. Especially when they're casting official voice actors. Seriously, in what kind of medium does the official voice actor who voiced the original character, end up playing that character based on the live-action actor's portrayal?

Plus saniwa character in this anime feels out of place. The production doesn't seem to respect their audience at all.